The Power Slap by Dana White has not been quite as successful as the UFC president had hoped. The TBS audience for the show has been unimpressive, and the ratings have been declining more or less continuously with each new episode.
Many sports fans have expressed their concern about the non-defensive aspect of the activity, stating that participants could have long-term brain aneurysms as a result of taking blows to the head without protection.
In the sport of slap fighting, two competitors stand on either side of a platform and alternately smack each other until one is unable to do so any longer. Power Slap uses a three-round format for fights that don’t end in knockouts, following which the winner is decided by the judges.
White and his business partners were successful in persuading the Nevada State Athletic Commission to grant the Power Slap a licence last October.
Now, months after casting his vote to licence the sport, Stephen J. Cloobeck, the former chairman of the Nevada State Athletic Commission, acknowledged that he could have erred:
I messed up, and I don’t like it. [Transcripts provided by Associated Press]
Dana White obviously feels differently. The 53-year-old denied Cloobeck’s assertions in an interview with The Spun by Sports Illustrated, asserting that an athletic commission’s main responsibility is to ensure the protection of the athletes and refrain from approving just activities that suit their own preferences:
“I have gone through this process twice. Literally verbatim, it’s the same things that people have expressed about the UFC. Regarding Cloobeck, he is no longer a member of the commission. Why then would you oppose regulation of it? Regulation doesn’t depend on a person’s preferences or tastes. It is the responsibility of athletic commissions to safeguard adults who voluntarily and intentionally choose to participate in unarmed combat sports.”
Dana White suggests Power Slap is safer than boxing
Power Slap, the latest slapfighting initiative from UFC president Dana White, has come under intense scrutiny from the athletic world and general public for being an all-around dangerous activity.
The 53-year-old, nevertheless, doesn’t see it that way. White made the claim that Power Slap competitors experience less punishment per event than boxers do during a boxing bout during a recent interview on Newsmax.
The UFC president gave the following justification for why his slap fighters only receive three slaps or less every event as contrasted to boxers, who endure between 400 and 600 blows per fight:
The average boxer receives four to six hundred punches during a fight, not counting the punches he received during sparring in preparation for the fight. These people consume three
